Abstract: This paper employs ethnographic data to illuminate how the religious imagination of Pentecostal Christianity has reconfigured the way the Kuki people in Assam imagine their life course. The paper begins with emic explorations about what Pentecostalism and various elements of Christian cosmology mean to the Kuki people. This follows with a detailed historical and ethnographic survey of the phenomenon of “Revival” in Songpijang Village, North Cachar Hills District (Assam, India). Revival is a collective emotional experience and ritual corroboree linked to the Protestant Christian idea of being “born again.” A close interrogation of its features reveals that it has altered Kuki perceptions of space of time—rewiring their categories of understanding, so to speak. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), this paper refers to this altered time-space as the “Revival Chronotope” and proposes that its dominance in Kuki society may be considered as a new form of “living heritage” that connects the Kuki people to a past, present, and future beyond their traditional culture and history.
Keywords: Pentecostalism, Revival, Chronotope, Life Course, Kuki Tribe, Assam.
Title: The Revival Chronotope: Understanding Pentecostal Revival among the Kuki in Assam
Author: Nancy C. Malsawmtluangi, Mini Bhattacharyya
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
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